Cid Corman

by Cid Corman

Cid Corman

Cid Corman (1924-2004), poet, editor, and translator, was born in Boston. He received his bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and masters at the University of Michigan. In 1951, he founded Origin, a poetry magazine that published Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Louis Zukofsky, among many others. He studied for awhile at the Sorbonne, moved to a small town in Italy to teach English, and then to Japan, where met and married Konishi Shizumi. He passed away in 2004 in Kyoto.

Corman is one of modernism’s enduring masters, a poet of prodigious talent and production whose work, both as poet and publisher, is intertwined with the Objectivists Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Among those many giants, Corman’s verse is perhaps the most committed to the sublime, refusing the temptation of “effect” for the tactile ink of line and “touch.” Nothing/Doing presents a vital poetry of Zen koan and cognitive conundrum, but also one of uncompromising wisdom, where Corman can definitively declare: “There’s only/one poem:/ this is it.…

The poet Cid Corman has written: “Poetry calls for anonymity. It appeals, in short, to the each in all and the all in each. Its particularity must become yours. My song must sing into you a little moment, stay in you what presence can muster––of sense more than meaning, of love more than sense, of giving the life given one with the same fullness that brought each forth, each to each from each, nothing left but the life that is going on.…

“For the vast majority of Italians and others to whom the name means anything, Matera is synonymous with abject poverty and backwardness. In fact, being the capital of its province, which occupies the lower and Eastern half of the region known today as La Basilicata, in the highlands inland between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic, it is relatively affluent in a world where degradation is the rule. It has a railway terminal, all the functionary establishments of authority, more than a dozen churches, and a growing middle-class.…

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”